USCO: At Home with the Company of Us

USCO: At Home with the Company of Us
Thursday, January 28, 2016
6:30–8pm
ICI Curatorial Hub
401 Broadway, Suite 1620
FREE and open to the public

Curatorial Intensive alumnus Pat Elifritz, along with Alex Kitnick, Julie Niemi, and David Senior, will speak about the work and enduring influence of artist collective USCO.

The Company of Us (USCO) helped define “intermedia” in the 1960s. Their multichannel environments and events of layered image, language, light, and sound were emblematically psychedelic, but also represented an important moment in arts interdisciplinarity. USCO worked out of a retrofitted church in the Hudson Valley town of Garnerville that also served as a venue, hub, and home. The group was formed in 1963 by poet Gerd Stern, painter Stephen Durkee, and engineer Michael Callahan, with frequent collaborators like Whole Earth Catalog founder Stewart Brand. This talk will consider USCO’s installations and events, their Garnerville home, their relationship with Marshall McLuhan, and their proximity to other countercultural collectives.

This event is free and open to the public. To attend, please RSVP to .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) with USCO in the subject line.

January 28, 2016

ICI Curatorial Hub
401 Broadway, Suite 1620
New York, NY 10013

presenter

Pat Elifritz is Curator of New Media and Technology at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit. Past positions include Villa Vassilieff / Bétonsalon Center for Art and Research (Paris) and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts (Chicago). He is a graduate of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

Alex Kitnick teaches at Bard College, where he was recently appointed the Brant Foundation Fellow in Contemporary Arts. In 2010 he received his PhD from the Department of Art & Archaeology at Princeton University. From 2011 to 2012 he held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles. Kitnick’s work frequently focuses on the intersection of art and architecture. He has edited numerous volumes including a collection of John McHale’s writings, The Expendable Reader: Articles on Art, Architecture, Design, and Media, 1951-1979, and October 136 on New Brutalism. He is a frequent contributor to Artforum, October, and Texte zur Kunst, among other publications.

Julie Niemi is an Assistant Curator of Exhibitions at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center (JMKAC) in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, where her primary focus is presenting the Arts Center’s collection of folk art, self-taught art, and artist-built environments. Taking this rich collection and its history as a starting point, she incorporates these works into accessible curatorial projects that explore contemporary themes and issues alongside emerging artists. Prior to joining JMKAC, she held positions as Curatorial Fellow at the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter, Oslo, Norway and as Communications Associate at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has provided editorial and marketing support for: RAM Publications, Los Angeles; Project Projects, New York; Inventory Press, New York; and East of Borneo, Los Angeles. She is holds an M.A. from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College.

David Senior is the Bibliographer at The Museum of Modern Art Library, where he manages collection development of the Library’s general holdings and the selection of materials for the artists’ books collection. With Printed Matter, he organizes an annual program of events for the New York Art Book Fair. Senior has lectured widely on the history of artists’ publications and modes of archiving avant-garde art and design activities of the 20th century.

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